Abstract
Self-evaluation is not a technical term in philosophy.1 Rather, it is common to associate the expression “self-evaluation” with contexts of psychologically oriented supervision where individuals or groups are encouraged to evaluate themselves for the purpose of getting clear about their goals, their motivations and possibilities of improving their performances.2 The present volume is an attempt to add philosophical weight to the concept of self-evaluation. The philosophical perspective associates “self-evaluation” instantly with long-standing key topics of philosophical research such as the metaphysics of the self, the nature of self-reference and the nature of values. “Self-evaluation” seems to be a notion conceptually close to Socrates’ seminal “Know thyself” which, down to the present day, has been inducing an unceasing stream of reflection under the key notes of “self-consciousness” and “self-knowledge”.
I am deeply indebted to Keith Lehrer and Fabrice Teroni for their detailed and insightful comments that were of great value in developing the ideas presented in this text. I also wish to thank Cain Todd for linguistic help and an anonymous referee for valuable remarks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This statement is based on the fact that there are no recent philosophical books or articles attempting to provide a systematic account of self-evaluation. It is not intended to mean that self-evaluation has not been treated in philosophy. A prominent positive example is Harry Frankfurt’s theory of second-order desires: Frankfurt characterizes the formation of second-order desires as a manifestation of “the capacity for reflective self-evaluation” that he takes to be a human-specific property (Frankfurt 1971, 7). And Charles Taylor attempts to refine Frankfurt’s approach to self-evaluation by elaborating a distinction between “strong” and “weak” self-evaluation: the latter is concerned with potential outcomes of a desire’s satisfaction, while the former is concerned with a desire’s internal value properties (Taylor 1977).
- 2.
In scientific psychology, instances of self-evaluation are accounted for in a variety of terms, such as “self-assessment”, “self-control”, “self-esteem”, “self-representation” etc. (Tesser 2003).
- 3.
Admittedly, there is the problem that “there is no established or happy English translation of ‘erkennen’ unless, like some Anglophone epistemologists long ago, we talk of an ‘act of knowing that’” (ibid.).
- 4.
I use both the notions “judgment” and “doxastic” in a narrow epistemologically inspired sense: while “judgment” stands for “asserted propositional thought”, “doxastic” stands for “concerning knowledge understood as entailing correct judgings”. Differing uses of the notions “judgment” or “judging” may yield different views on the interdependence of evaluation and judgment (and, a fortiori, knowledge). K. Lehrer and N. Smith work with a notion of judgment meaning both “acceptance” in the epistemological sense of “evaluated” or “justified” belief, and “preference” understood as evaluated desires (Lehrer and Smith 1996, 10). Alternatively, R. Solomon characterizes feelings as “judgments of the body”: “There are feelings, “affects” if you like, critical to emotion. But they are not distinct from cognition or judgment and they are not mere “read-outs” of processes going on in the body. They are judgments of the body, and this is the “missing” element in the cognitive theory of emotions” (Solomon 2003a, 16).
- 5.
My view of judging as asserting propositionally structured “thoughts” or “contents” is not committed to the view that assertion is a linguistic act manifested in intersubjectively perceivable signs. It is inspired by the traditional intentionalist view that judging is first of all an essentially mental act. I use quotation marks “p” to indicate subjective instantiations of p, whether they be purely mental or linguistically shaped.
- 6.
See, for example, “Appraisal Theories” of emotions (e.g. R. Lazarus, K. Scherer) or neo-Stoic “Cognitivist Theories” of emotions (e.g. M. Nussbaum, R. Solomon).
- 7.
It has been argued that having no inferential structure, “scenario content” is not conceptual: “Although a scenario content does have a structure, it does not have inferential structure – and so does not have conceptual constituents” (Crane 1992, 155). It seems to me, however, that concepts representing a certain order of things allow being arranged in patterns that need not be propositionally structured. For a discussion of the problem of minimal recognitional capacities see Bermúdez 1998, chs. 3 and 4, and Tye 2009.
- 8.
“[D]irect apprehension [… ] is a relation which you may have to a proposition, equally when you believe it and when you do not, and equally when it is true and when it is false; whereas immediate knowledge is one form of the relation which I called knowledge proper [which] is a relation which you never have to a proposition, unless, besides directly apprehending it, you also believe it; and unless, besides this, the proposition itself is true [… ]; direct apprehension is a relation which you may have to things which are not propositions, whereas immediate knowledge [… ] is a relation which you can only have to propositions” (Moore 1993, 75 f.).
- 9.
This move is quite natural in languages such as German where “wissen”, “erkennen”, “kennen” and “können” are semantically distinguished. The distinction between “knowledge” and “expertness” outlined above approximately captures the distinction between “wissen” (knowing) on the one hand, and “kennen” (being acquainted) and “können” (being capable, knowing how to do) on the other hand.
- 10.
Notions such as “tacit knowledge” and “implicit knowledge” belong to the same family of notions of potential knowledge.
- 11.
It has been argued, however, that not even subjectivists about values deny there to be “objective evaluations relative to standards” of quality or merit that determine the “justice” of value judgments. The non-arbitrariness of the relevant standards is explained, for instance, in terms of the purposes the evaluated item serves (Mackie 1977, 16 f.).
- 12.
More correctly, evaluation is triadic R(x, y, V): x evaluates y with regard to value V.
- 13.
In the following, I will use the notions “reflexive” and “reflexivity” for R(x, y) featuring x = y, without specifying whether x = y holds necessarily or contingently for R. I take it that, logically, evaluation is a nonreflexive relation. One could argue, however, that if a mental state ψ’ is directed to its own subject S it is a state sui generis and cannot be modeled on mental state ψ directed to an object different from S. It is a highly controversial issue whether, for instance, there is a difference of kind or in kind between interpersonal deception and self-deception (Dupuy 1998, Mele 2009).
- 14.
A systematic and historically-informed discussion of views on the reference of “self” can be found in Diggory 1966, chap. 1. Diggory argues against a reified self, but for an objective reference of the word “self”. According to him, the lowest common denominator of the meaning of “self” is “the relation between the agent and the object of his action in which agent and object are the same organism. The aim of this definition is to scrape away from the word “self” the confusing encrustation of affective connotations” (op. cit., vii). On the other hand, Diggory holds that “without an objective definition we could hardly hope to study self by the most powerful investigative methods [… ] of experiment” (ibid.).
- 15.
“For a time during this century, attempts were made to remove the word self from the vocabulary of serious scientific researchers because of its inferential and unmeasurable status. [… ] For the tough-minded [… ] it was observable behavior that really mattered. But the concept of self would not vanish, and it now appears – usually in hyphenated form with some other word such as esteem, efficacy, regulation, regard – in psychological literature with greater frequency than ever before” (Ogilvie and Clark 1992, 186 f.).
- 16.
Gertler (2003) provides a good overview.
- 17.
The questions of value-rating or value-monism shall not concern us here.
- 18.
This claim is neutral with regard to the question whether perceptual episodes are propositionally structured. It sides, however, with ontological realism against constructivism.
- 19.
- 20.
The term “part” does not involve a commitment to an explicit mereology of the personal unit. It could be replaced by terms such as “aspect”, “constituent”, “moment” etc., each of them trailing its own theoretical load.
- 21.
It seems plausible to hold, however, that in virtue of the internal relations between such “parts” and the personal “whole” immediate self-evaluation a fortiori pertains to the entire person.
- 22.
- 23.
I do not consider here the possibility that the self-evaluator is a bundle of tropes – including value tropes – reflecting on one of its constituents. A bundle view of persons plausibly rebuts the externalist claim, but it carries along other problems such as the indeterminacy of the subject. I admit that relating the main target of self-evaluation to the Socratic appeal “Know thyself!” is somehow tendentious, since the account might seem implicitly committed to a classical substance-attribute ontology of persons.
- 24.
I guess that the conceptual framework of self-evaluation is better suited to meet the challenge of situationalism than the conceptual framework of self-knowledge. Contrary to “evaluation”, “knowledge” is not only an achievement term but also an explicit success term. Knowing oneself implies that one is successful in making true judgments about oneself, while evaluating oneself is not as tightly bound to success conditions. Given that evaluation is accounted for in terms of experiential faculties and processes, it involves error and failure and can accommodate the latter in the conception of evaluating oneself.
- 25.
Gabriele Taylor labels pride, shame and guilt as “emotions of self-assessment”. She defends, however, a cognitivist account of self-assessing emotions, holding that the label applies to these emotions because they “resemble each other in requiring the same sorts of beliefs”, i.e. the feeling subject’s belief that s/he “has deviated from some norm” (Taylor 1985, 1). Hence, the evaluative function of these emotions is clearly attributed to the doxastic element involved in the emotional experience: “What is believed amounts to an assessment of that self” (passim).
- 26.
Ben Ze’ev defends a compositional theory of emotions according to which evaluation, motivation and cognition are the three components of the “intentional dimension” of emotions (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 50). While the cognitive component “consists of information about given circumstances”, the evaluative component “assesses the personal significance of this information”, and the motivational component “addresses our desires, or readiness to act, in these circumstances” (passim). Ben Ze’ev emphasizes, however, that he considers neither of these three components nor the feeling dimension of emotion as a “separate entity or state”: “Emotions do not entail the separate performance of four varieties of activity” (passim).
- 27.
Bennett Helm emphasizes that the evaluation felt in emotion and desire cannot be separated from the motivation implicit in these states (“to evaluate in the way characteristic of desire just is to be motivated to pursue it”), whereas “evaluative judgment can be dissociated from motivation” (Helm 2002, 15).
- 28.
Objective self-evaluation is not to be confused with “gratuitous self-assertions” (Diggory 1966, viii).
- 29.
For an account of what is constitutive and what is typical of shame and guilt see Deonna and Teroni (2008). For a critical assessment of the claim that shame is essentially social see Deonna and Teroni (Chapter 11, this volume).
- 30.
Margaret Gilbert holds that a distribution of individuals will become a “plural subject” in virtue of a specific normative act of “joint commitment” (Gilbert 2006, 144 f.). Being the ruling principle of plural subjecthood, joint commitment requires that each member “must openly express his or her readiness to be jointly committed with the relevant others”, and that all members “understand themselves to have a special standing in relation to one another” such that “no individual party […] can rescind it unilaterally” (Gilbert 2002, 126 f.).
- 31.
Philip Pettit explicitly augments the claim that “social integrates” are rational and intentional entities to the claim that they exhibit institutional personhood, arguing that “rational unification is a project for which persons must be taken to assume responsibility” (Pettit 2003, 185). Since social integrates do display the behavior required for personhood – i.e. make avowals of intentional states and actions and acknowledge them as their own – Pettit concludes “that they are institutional persons, not just institutional subjects or agents” (ibid.).
References
Ben-Ze’ev, A. 2000. The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.
Bermúdez, J. L. 1998. The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Biederman, I., and M. M. Shiffrar. 1987. “Sexing Day-Old Chicks: A Case Study and Expert Systems Analysis of a Difficult Perceptual-Learning Task.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 13:640–45.
Brandom, R. 2007. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (1):127–50.
Brewer, M., and M. Hewstone. eds. 2004. Emotion and Motivation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Charland, L. C., and P. Zachar. 2008. Fact and Value in Emotion. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Crane, T. 1992. “The Nonconceptual Content of Experience.” In The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception, edited by T. Crane, 136–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darley, J. M., and C. D. Batson. 1973. “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27:100–08.
Deonna, J. A. 2006. “Emotion, Perception and Perspective.” Dialectica 60 (1):29–46.
Deonna, J., and F. Teroni. 2008. “Distinguishing Shame from Guilt.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 (3):725–40.
Diggory, J. C. 1966. Self-Evaluation: Concepts and Studies. New York: Wiley.
Dohrn, D. 2008. “Epistemic Immediacy and Reflection.” In Epistemology and Emotions, edited by G. Brun, U. Doğuoğlu, and D. Kuenzle, 105–24. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Döring, S. 2007. “Seeing What To Do: Affective Perception and Rational Motivation.” Dialectica 61 (3):363–94.
Doris, J. M. 1998. “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics.” Noûs 32:504–30.
Dreyfus, H. 1992. What Computers Still Can’t Do. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dupuy, J.-P. ed. 1998. Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Feldman, R. 1995. “In Defense of Closure.” Philosophical Quarterly 45:487–94.
Frankfurt, H. 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5–20.
Gerken, M. 2007. “Is Internalism About Knowledge Consistent with Content Externalism?” Philosophia 36 (1):87–96.
Gertler, B. ed. 2003. Privileged Access. Philosophical Accounts of Self-Knowledge. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Gilbert, M. 2002. “Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings.” The Journal of Ethics 6 (2):115–43.
Gilbert, M. 2006. A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society. Oxford: Clarendon.
Goldie, P. ed. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gorman, P. 2004. Motivation and Emotion. London: Routledge.
Harman, G. 2000. “The Nonexistence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100:223–26.
Harnad, S. 1996. “Experimental Analysis of Naming Behavior Cannot Explain Naming Capacity.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 65:262–64.
Helm, B. 2002. “Felt Evaluations: A Theory of Pleasure and Pain.” American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1):13–30.
Korsgaard, Ch. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leary, M. R., and J. P. Tangney. 2003. Handbook of Self and Identity. New York: Guilford Press.
Lehrer, K. 2000. “Discursive knowledge.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3):637–53.
Lehrer, K., B. J. Lum, B. A. Slichta, and N. D. Smith eds. 1996. Knowledge, Teaching, and Wisdom. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Lehrer, K., and N. D. Smith. 1996. “Knowledge, Teaching and Wisdom.” In: Lehrer et al. 1996, 3–17.
Lycan, W. G. 1986. “Tacit Belief.” In Belief: Form, Content, and Function, edited by R. J. Bogdan, 61–82. Oxford: Clarendon.
Lyons, W. 1980. Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mackie, J. L. 1977. Ethics. Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin.
Mele, A. R. ed. 2009. “Self-Deception.” Social Theory and Practice (special issue) 35 (1).
Mischel, T. ed. 1977. The Self. Psychological and Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Blackwell.
Moore, G. E. 1993. “Hume’s Theory Examined.” In Selected Writings, edited by T. Baldwin, 59–78. London–New York: Routledge.
Moran, R. 2001. Authority and Estrangement: An essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mulligan, K. 2007. “Intentionality, Knowledge and Formal Objects.” Disputatio II (23):205–28.
Mulligan, K. 2009. “On Being Struck by Value – Exclamations, Motivations and Vocations.” In Leben mit Gefühlen. Emotionen, Werte und ihre Kritik, edited by B. Merker, 141–61. Paderborn: Mentis.
Mulligan, K. 2010. Emotions and Values. In: Goldie 2010, 475–500.
Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Brien, L. 2007. Self-Knowing Agents. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Ogilvie, D. M., and M. D. Clark. 1992. “The Best and Worst of It: Age and Sex Difference in Self-Discrepanies Research.” In Self-Perspectives Across the Life Span, edited by R. Lipka and T. Brinthaupt, 186–223. Albany: SUNY Press.
Pettit, P. 2003. “Groups with Minds of Their Own.” In Socializing Metaphysics, edited by F. Schmitt, 167–95. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Prinz, J. 2004. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pritchard, D., and J. Kallestrup. 2004. “An Argument for the Inconsistency of Content Externalism and Epistemic Internalism.” Philosophia 31 (3–4):345–54.
Rovane, C. A. 1998. The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sabini, J., and M. Silver. 2005. “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued.” Ethics 115:535–62.
Searle, J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.
Solomon, R. 2003a. “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What Is a ‘Cognitivist Theory’ of the Emotions and Does It Neglect Affectivity? In The Philosophy of the Emotions, edited by A. Hatzymoisis, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Solomon, R. 2003b. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. 2009. Reflective Knowledge (=Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, vol. II). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sgaravatti, D., and E. Zardini. 2008. “Knowing How to Establish Intellectualism.” Grazer Philosophische Studien 77:217–61.
Stanley, J., and T. Williamson. 2001. “Knowing How.” The Journal of Philosophy 98 (8):411–44.
Tappolet, C. 2000. Emotions et valeurs. Paris: PUF.
Taylor, C. 1977. What Is Human Agency? In: Mischel, 103–35.
Taylor, G. 1985. Pride, Shame and Guilt – Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tesser, A. 2003. Self-Evaluation. In: Leary & Tangney, 275–90.
Tuomela, R. 2006. “Joint Intention, We-Mode and I-Mode.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30:35–58.
Tye, M. 2009. Consciousness Revisited: Materialism Without Phenomenal Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Konzelmann Ziv, A. (2011). Self-Evaluation – Philosophical Perspectives. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Lehrer, K., Schmid, H. (eds) Self-Evaluation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1265-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1266-9
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)